A malfunction in a piece of switching equipment caused cell and landline phone outages through portions of central Baldwin County Tuesday morning. The outage was just over one hour, and anecdotal reports say that area businesses were disrupted when merchants were not able to authorize credit card transactions.

“There was a malfunction in a DACS (digital access and cross-connect system) switching device in the Foley office,” said Ann Marie Sartor, a spokesperson for CenturyTel, the company that runs the equipment in a telephone interview.

According to Sartor, “We got with the vendor (of the equipment) and the manufacturer and we are running diagnostics now.”

Sartor added that some phone, long distance and 911 calls were disrupted by the equipment failure.

That cell and landline calls share equipment was a surprise to some, but not to representatives of telephone companies.

“The T-1 circuit did go down,” said Caran Smith, a spokesperson for Verizon, one of the companies affected by the outage. “That carries voice and data, but the good news is that everything came back up quickly.”

“Cell phones do share some equipment (with land lines),” said Sartor.

Fixing the equipment was a priority for CenturyTel.

“We got the service back up as fast as possible,” said Sartor, who said the company will investigate why the equipment failed.